What I read this week - 2024.10.27

A few articles I enjoyed reading this past week.

This week's best article is a deeply thoughtful piece from Simon Sarris about how school is not enough for children. As I read through the piece, I nodded in agreement, and overall, this piece applies equally well to all human beings—not just children.

School is Not Enough

Learning is a consequence of doing

The Map is Mostly WaterSimon Sarris

LLM usage in my daily work continues to increase. For more difficult problems, your "prompt engineering" skills are always tested, and this article has a great template for helping you write tests with the latest LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic.

How we saved hundreds of engineering hours by writing tests with LLMs

Monarch is a planet-scale time series database built by Google to monitor their systems. This published paper is a deep dive into its entire design. I particularly like the section on its data model.

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol13/p3181-adams.pdf

The ATProtocol was designed by some brilliant people to power the next generation of decentralized social networking. Their documentation and usage of a SQLite-based system for each unique user is quite intriguing.

ATProto for distributed systems engineers - AT Protocol

AT Protocol is the tech developed at Bluesky for open social networking. In this article we’re going to explore AT Proto from the perspective of distributed backend engineering.

AT Protocol